What Five Game Launchers Cost Your PC Every Time It Boots

A reader sent me a screenshot of Task Manager last spring with a short question: why does a laptop with 16 GB of memory feel full before he has opened a single browser tab? The answer sat in the Startup tab. Steam, the Epic Games Launcher, the EA app, Ubisoft Connect and Battle.net were all set to launch at sign-in, each one quietly waiting for a game he might play on Saturday.

Nobody installs five launchers on purpose. You buy one game on a sale, claim a free one from Epic, and a publisher insists on its own client for a third. A year later the machine boots slower, the fan spins up at idle, and the cause never gets named because each launcher looks harmless on its own.

What I measured, and on what

I ran the test on a Lenovo IdeaPad with a Ryzen 5 5500U, 16 GB of RAM and a mid-range NVMe drive, running Windows 11 23H2. For each launcher I did a clean restart, let it sit signed in at its library page for ten minutes, then read memory use from Task Manager with all child processes grouped. Then I timed boot to a usable desktop with all five enabled, and again with none.

These are numbers from one machine over three runs, averaged. Your figures will differ with library size, display scaling and whatever the launcher downloaded overnight. Treat them as an order of magnitude, not a spec sheet.

Added up, that is roughly 1.47 GB of memory held by programs doing nothing useful while you write an email. Boot to a responsive desktop went from 31 seconds with no launchers to 58 seconds with all five. The disk was the bottleneck during those extra 27 seconds, which matches what you would expect on a drive also handling Windows Update and the antivirus scan at the same moment.

Why launchers are heavier than they look

Most modern launchers are web pages wearing an application costume. Steam's interface runs inside steamwebhelper, which is a build of Chromium. The EA app and Epic's client both lean on embedded browser engines as well. Each one carries its own copy of a browser, its own cache and its own background updater, so five launchers effectively means five small browsers that never close.

The second cost is the update check. Every client wants to patch itself and your games, and several schedule that work for the moment they detect the machine has gone idle. On a laptop running on battery, that is the exact moment you wanted the fan to stay quiet. I watched Ubisoft Connect pull 640 MB of game patch data on a hotel network once, while the laptop sat closed in a bag with a lid-close setting I had forgotten to change.

Third, overlays. Steam, EA, Ubisoft and Battle.net each offer an in-game overlay that hooks into the graphics pipeline. Stack two of them, as happens when you launch an Ubisoft game bought through Steam, and you get two layers of hooks fighting for the same keyboard shortcut. It rarely crashes anything. It does add a few milliseconds of frame time variance that shows up as stutter on weaker hardware.

The advice to uninstall everything is wrong

The usual forum answer is to remove every launcher you do not use daily. I disagree, for a practical reason: several of these clients are the only way to run games you already paid for. Uninstall the EA app and your copy of a Battlefield or The Sims 4 stops launching. Delete Battle.net and Diablo IV is gone until you reinstall it and wait for the verify pass.

The better target is not the launcher's existence but its behaviour. A launcher that only opens when you double-click a game costs you nothing on the days you do not play. That single change got the reader with the screenshot back to a 33 second boot without losing access to a single title.

A launcher you open on purpose is a tool. A launcher that opens itself is a tenant.

Where each setting hides

These settings move between versions, so the paths below are what I found in October 2026. If a menu has shifted, search the settings page for the word "startup".

• Steam: Settings, then Interface, then untick "Run Steam when my computer starts". While you are there, untick "Enable GPU accelerated rendering in web views" on an older laptop with integrated graphics; on my test machine that trimmed steamwebhelper by about 70 MB.
• Epic Games Launcher: Settings, then untick "Run When My Computer Starts". Also untick "Minimise to system tray" so closing the window actually closes it.
• EA app: Settings, Application, then turn off "Launch the EA app on startup". The background service may still register itself; you can set "EABackgroundService" to manual in Services if it keeps reappearing.
• Ubisoft Connect: Settings, General, untick "Launch Ubisoft Connect when computer starts".
• Battle.net: Settings, App, change "When I start my computer" to "Do nothing", and change "When I close Battle.net" to "Exit Battle.net completely".

After changing all five, open Task Manager's Startup apps page and confirm the Status column says Disabled. I have seen the EA app re-enable itself after a major update, so a check every couple of months is worth the thirty seconds. Our guide to the settings worth changing right after you install a new app covers the same habit for non-game software.

A note on memory and when it matters

On a desktop with 32 GB, 1.5 GB of idle launchers is an annoyance rather than a problem. On an 8 GB laptop it is close to a fifth of total memory, and Windows will start paging to disk once you add a browser with a dozen tabs. If you are unsure which camp your machine falls into, the breakdown in how much RAM you actually need walks through the arithmetic. The broader cleanup steps in speeding up a sluggish Windows laptop pair well with this one, since launchers are rarely the only thing sitting in the Startup list.

One honest caveat. I have not measured these clients on macOS, where only Steam, Epic and Battle.net have native versions and the memory accounting works differently. I would not assume the same totals there.

Your task for this week

Open Task Manager, click Startup apps, and sort by "Startup impact". Write down every game launcher on the list and its rating. Then disable launch at sign-in inside each launcher's own settings, not just in Task Manager, because some clients flip the Task Manager switch back on their next update. Restart, time the boot with your phone's stopwatch, and compare it to the time before. If you want more game-adjacent tuning after that, the rest of our games section picks up where this leaves off.